Even judges can't outlaw our love of a good scandal

The increasing number of celebrities using the law to conceal their
peccadilloes might be fighting a losing battle, says William Langley.

Censored: Louise Bagshawe, a Tory MP, almost gives away the identity of an injunction's subject on 'Have I Got News for You'Photo: BBC

By William Langley

9:00PM BST 23 Apr 2011

A few years ago, it was possible to argue that scandal was dead. Many feared it would be sorely missed, but confronted by the gormlessness of modern celebrity, it wasn't hard to see where things had gone wrong. Occasionally, there would be a faint flicker of revival, in the shape of a Tiger Woods or an Angus Deayton, but the fashionable view remained that the public was no longer bothered by the misbehaviour of the famous. Not only that, but the chattering classes held this to be a thoroughly good thing. It meant that we had grown up as a society, shaken off our narrow-mindedness and prurience, and were now at ease with the irresistibility of Lord Prescott to the hired help.

It has taken the bizarre nannying of the High Court in London to rocket scandal back to its pre-crash levels. All over the country, millions are merrily engaged in unearthing the identities of "a famous footballer", "a world-renowned actor", and "entertainment industry figure", and figuring out which of them did what to whom. No sooner has one name been cracked – a process that usually takes little more than a few well-aimed clicks on the internet – than another comes hurtling down the super-injunction speedway, and the rest of the world becomes ever more convinced that we're nuts.

Or, at least, seriously confused. The confusion is presented in high-minded terms, as one between the right to privacy and the right to free expression. But that's a red herring. What the British are really confused about is whether they are interested in famous people's private lives or not. When asked directly, the public says it isn't, but – to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies – "It would, wouldn't it?"

The celebrities, therefore, aren't taking any chances. Since 2008, more than 30 mostly wealthy, well-known and male applicants have been granted injunctions of varying degrees of deadliness in order to stop newspapers publishing things about themselves that they want to keep secret. It isn't hard to understand their concerns. Even a footballer is entitled to possess, albeit beneath a bonce of silo-busting thickness, a small cell-cluster of moral indignation that glows hot to such headlines as: "Soccer Rat Cheats on Wife".

The problem is that going to the law offers no real protection. Often, it only succeeds in making things worse. John Terry, the Chelsea FC captain, won an early super-injunction that not only prevented newspapers from reporting allegations that he had cheated on his wife with a former team-mate's girlfriend, but banned them from reporting the injunction's existence.

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By the time the gagging order was lifted – following a successful counter-argument that Terry was using it to protect his lucrative sponsorship deals rather than his privacy – almost everyone who cared about such matters already knew his identity.

It isn't just sexual profligacy that will land you in trouble. Take the case of Sir Fred Goodwin, the over-promoted Scottish accountant, who – following the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland under his stewardship – was widely accused of being "the world's worst banker". Smarting from such media attacks, Sir Fred obtained a super-injunction, to conceal certain information that remains mysterious, which forbade even the description of him as "a banker". The order, however, became public knowledge when John Hemming, the Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, used parliamentary privilege to refer to it in the House of Commons, thus ensuring that an even heavier dump of public ordure landed on Sir Fred's head.

No one doubts that the judges who issue these injunctions do so only after careful consideration of the facts, and in the belief that the orders are justified. The problem isn't so much the High Court's grasp of the law, as its understanding of how gossip works and why, in an admittedly lurid and insidious way, it does us all plenty of good.

In issuing an order last week on behalf of the married "entertainment industry figure", Mr Justice Ward declared that permitting publication of the story of his affair with a colleague "would not enhance the social, economic or political life of the country".

This is the kind of thing judges feel obliged to say when ruling on matters of public interest, and while obvious on one level, it completely misses the point. No one pretends that celebrity kiss-and-tells will fix the deficit or heal the fissures within the Coalition. Yet the taste for gossip and scandal runs deep in British life, and there is plenty to suggest that it helps give us a cleaner country and higher standards than a lot of other places. These days, we are all urged to look up to France, where, supposedly, a nation of sophisticates shrugs off the peccadilloes of public figures and – just in case – a privacy law prevents anyone knowing about them. The problem is that the French law, introduced in the 1970s as a well-meaning attempt to protect individuals from intrusion, has long since been hijacked by the Establishment and its allies as a means of concealment. In Britain, exposure has worked well, both as a deterrent and as a reliable source of mass entertainment – which, however guiltily enjoyed, has been generally accepted as an occupational hazard of celebrity.

The famous names now seeking shelter from the courts appear to be banking, as much as anything, on the belief that our appetite for this kind of thing is exhausted, and that, as the bien pensants tell us, scandal is dead. It could be a false hope. Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, is soon to report on the effectiveness of the super-injunctions, with much of the nation's press in uproar, and the Prime Minister expressing doubts about the courts making laws that Parliament wouldn't necessarily endorse.

The late Elizabeth Taylor remarked that it is in the depths of scandal that you find out who your true friends are. It would be sad if, in modern Britain, they turned out to be sitting in the High Court.